EXIT MUSIC
Ian Rankin
Little, Brown and Company
Mystery
ISBN: 9780316057585
“There should be mess.
There should be fuss.
There should be blood.”
Any time John Rebus is around, there is mess, there is fuss and there is blood. But maybe he is about to see the end of all that, for retirement is just eight days away. Most cops would hope to ease quietly from the ranks, spending their final days with the department keeping as low a profile as possible. Undoubtedly, Rebus’s superiors had hoped for that too. But Rebus is not most cops. He cannot be likened to any cop, real or fictional. He is enigmatic and unique, not to mention stubborn. He takes a right turn when all indications say take a left. He pursues the unlikely just because he has an intuition. And he never blindly follows orders. Pity the man who calls himself John Rebus’s boss.
Fortunately, Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke strikes a nice balance with her partner. She is ready to take the lead when Rebus retires. In fact, one might even say she is eager. With Rebus on the way out, she is put in charge of this latest investigation: the murder of a famous Russian poet in the streets of Edinburgh.
Rankin opened the first book featuring DI Rebus with the same sentence that opens the last in the series: "The girl screamed once, only the once…." The girl screamed when she stumbled upon the poet’s body. A couple returning from the theater heard her panicked cries and stopped to help. When the police arrived, the witnesses’ stories did not help much and they seemed to be less than completely truthful. With the slimmest of evidence, Rebus is off and running, intent on catching one more killer before he hands in his badge.
A contingent of wealthy Russians is staying at a hotel not far from where the poet ended up dead. They tend not to be especially forthcoming when interviewed, leaning toward blatantly hostile. Little do they realize that DI Rebus likes dealing with hostile witnesses. He considers forceful extraction of information to be high entertainment. Again striking a balance, DS Clarke employs a much different interview technique from Rebus. Despite their divergent styles, she cannot help but admire his results, and he reluctantly admits that she might be okay on her own.
So far, Rebus has been defined by his career. How will he survive retirement? His cases always seem to get complicated. There is usually more than meets the eye, or, in this case, maybe less than meets the eye. As Rebus tries hard to implicate his long-time nemesis Big Ger Cafferty in a last, desperate effort, an uneasy respect settles between the two men. But uneasy is precisely what it is. Edinburgh can be a small town when big crime flexes its muscles. Mix in Russian businessmen hungry for easy investment opportunities, and the result is explosive.
Not only does Rebus and, by extension, Clarke have to battle the bad guys, but there are those within the department who are more than anxious to see the end of John Rebus. Whether he wants this retirement or not, it’s coming. If only he can make a grand exit…
Ian Rankin’s fans will rue the day that he decided to end the Rebus series. Is it reasonable to hope that maybe the detective inspector may not leave the department after all? Or could it be that we will visit John Rebus in his retirement, begrudgingly summoned to help on an impossibly tough case? EXIT MUSIC has all the earmarks of the last book. We can only hope that Rankin will reconsider. More. We want more.
--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers
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